The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyertag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html/12008-05-30T04:26:13ZMovable Type Publishing Platform 4.01It's an honor just to have been nominatedtag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.12212008-05-30T04:10:27Z2008-05-30T04:26:13ZSo I have a question: does the California Board of Bar Examiners ask *everyone* who passes the bar whether they'd like to be a grader? To clarify, one's eligibility does seem to be keyed to one's residence in the Bay...
the hell the bar examiners put me through last year, trying to pass the damn test, dinging me the first time because I was apparently two measly points too stupid, oh, *now* they think I'm good enough that they want me to help them???
A part of me is, of course, intrigued. I can't actually commit to it for the July grading cycle anyway, but I can keep myself of their mailing list for future exams. Even so, would it be worth it? The gig does pay, but probably not nearly enough to justify the massive time commitment. Three hours a day, every day, for up to 10 weeks? I just can't see that kind of time commitment getting me anywhere closer to any of my professional or life goals.
And given that even reading this year's new JDs write about plunging into BarBri on their blogs is making my skin crawl, I think I need to get a lot more distance between myself and that test before I could even think about helping. I finally sold my bar review books a few months ago, and good riddance to them and that whole experience.
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Final(?) notetag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11822008-01-22T07:11:27Z2008-01-22T16:55:04ZI will not be deleting this blog. In fact, for as long as I can (i.e., I fear the next upgrade...) I plan to keep it mounted on the blogging software, meaning that comments will remain open and functional. Conceivably...
next upgrade...) I plan to keep it mounted on the blogging software, meaning that comments will remain open and functional. Conceivably I may also post to it if I decide to write any sort of "Great Change"-ish wrap up posts and whatnot. However if I do I will link back to here from the new blog, so it's only necessary to check the one site for new writing.
If you have me in your links or blog roll please note the changed URL. The new blog is at http://www.cathygellis.com/soi/, or, alternatively you can link to http://www.cathygellis.com/, which will (soon) be set to redirect to the new blog.]]>
New blogtag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11812008-01-22T07:00:38Z2008-01-22T16:52:23ZI have a new blog! This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as I've been intimating for some time that it was in the works. For a while now I've felt a bit of a slave to my...
I have a new blog! This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as I've been intimating for some time that it was in the works. For a while now I've felt a bit of a slave to my narrative, "The Great Change," but as long as there was more to tell, I was committed to telling it. But now that the story has been wrapped up it's a good time to move on and spread my writing wings in other ways. Don't worry, it'll still be me and my voice over there, but hopefully sounding like someone with the ethos of a trained and licensed legal professional and less like the bewildered law student I no longer am.]]>
The Great Change, Transcendence Completetag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11772008-01-21T20:28:49Z2008-01-21T20:48:46ZI realize that I've written a post before entitled, "The Great Change completed," because, in memorializing my first admittance to a bar, it was technically true: I had indeed become a lawyer. But for me the process of really becoming...
The Great Change completed," because, in memorializing my first admittance to a bar, it was technically true: I had indeed become a lawyer. But for me the process of really becoming a lawyer continued on beyond that, through another year of examinations and unlicensed jobs.
But all that has finally changed, as last month I finally got sworn into the jurisdiction where I live, and last Monday I showed up for my first day of my first job that has ever required a license. Now the Great Change really is complete.
I've always regarded becoming a lawyer as something transcendental, like you start out a mere mortal and then get spat out at the other end as something else. Now that I'm at the other end, I think that's right. In a very tangible way it really does involve a transcendental state change: having a law license gives you a kind of potency you cannot possibly have without it. And the process of becoming a lawyeritself is very changing. I feel like a house that's been under extensive renovation all these years, having been taken all the way down to the studs before finally being rebuilt into something better.
Life goes on, of course, and I suspect that, like anyone, I will continue to change, as a person and as a lawyer, but this great change has been completed, and it's time to close the book on this chapter of my life. ]]>
Working for a living, the lawyer versiontag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11762008-01-20T22:18:44Z2008-01-20T22:39:37ZThe nice thing about having December off was that it gave me some time to think about what I'd like to do with my life. Don't panic: I still mean to be a lawyer. But it was nice to have...
stories of sweatshop environments at some major law firms in New York, where temporary attorneys are apparently treated as fungible and disposable. Maybe there's some hyperbole in these reports, and maybe these stories are the exception rather than the rule, but there seems to be enough truth to them to give one pause.
The biggest reason, however, for why settling in for a while as a contract attorney isn't a good plan for me at the moment is that you can get stuck doing it. There's no significant career progression from a contract attorney to anything else. It's not like a temp-to-hire situation: few people ever seem to go from contract attorney to regular associate.
Most contract work is also document review, which is not necessarily the most scintillating aspect to law practice. I actually don't mind it too much, but I may have been lucky in that all the document reviews I've done have actually been interesting. Still, no matter how enjoyable the reviews, I know it's not the only thing I want to be doing. I want more varied work, involving all aspects of litigation, and to have some sort of responsibility for a case -- not just a specific assigned task.
Whatever I do for a living, however, will require keeping an eye on the long view: making a difference. For the foreseeable future I'm glad to work for the sake of working, to continue to learn this trade and to make enough money to make the loans go away. But if there were to come a day when I looked back on my career and saw that I had done nothing to influence sensible policy, then no matter how brilliantly I'd litigated or how much money I'd earned along the way, I'd consider my career a failure. It's this fear that's partly behind the motivation to write, as no matter what I do during my day job I'll still have an avenue for making my voice heard. ]]>
Perhaps I should send James Cicconi my note?tag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11752008-01-11T06:03:08Z2008-01-11T06:55:56ZMy note remains as relevant today as when I wrote it. Brad Stone at the New York Times Bits Blog is reporting that various ISPs are considering filtering the Internet traffic whose transmission they facilitate in order to police for...
My note remains as relevant today as when I wrote it. Brad Stone at the New York Times Bits Blog is reporting that various ISPs are considering filtering the Internet traffic whose transmission they facilitate in order to police for copyright violations:
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
...
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
...
“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”
As Orin Kerr noted, "I hope that 'open discussion' includes a frank discussion of legal liability under the federal Wiretap Act." Because, as both he and I agree, the kind of monitoring Cicconi's talking about doing isn't likely to be legal.
My note, CopySense and Sensibility: How the Wiretap Act Forbids Universities from Using P2P Monitoring Tools, 12 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 340 (2006), directly addressed this issue. Generally speaking, the Wiretap Act forbids the interception of private communications except in specific and narrow circumstances, none of which apply to universities trying to police for copyright infringement and are even less applicable to ordinary ISPs trying to do the same.
Of course, the devil is in the details. The Wiretap Act is a 1968 law that was written well before the Internet age and then significantly amended, sloppily, just before its dawn (with the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act). The current statute, 18 U.S.C. 2500 et seq., is consequently encumbered with language that doesn't directly correlate to the nature of Internet technology, leaving courts to try to figure out whether and how its terms might still be applicable to it. As a result the evolving case law is a little messy, but nonetheless there is precedent to support the extension of the Wiretap Act's language to Internet communications. Which is as it should be, as the privacy interests users have in their Internet communications exist and are similarly worthy of the Wiretap Act's privacy protections as those of their telephonic communications, which the Act definitely protects.
Many people have been weighing in on this issue, including Orin Kerr and Bruce Boyden at Concurring Opinions and all the people in all the comments of all these posts. Many find this plan to filter upsetting and philosophically wrong on several levels, including because of the loss of privacy such monitoring would cause, the subjugation of private interests to large corporate interests these efforts would represent, and the practical problem raised by the fact that nearly everything that passes through the Internet is copyrighted by someone by simple virtue of it having been created, yet the ISPs have no way to know who owns the majority of it nor any way to tell whether if any of it is being transmitted with permission.
These are all significant concerns, but they become largely moot if such monitoring is on its own illegal under the Act. The problem is that because the Act's language is so befuddling, everyone's analysis of this legal question takes different tacks. People go back and forth debating whether and how the proposed filtering qualifies as using a "device" to "intentionally" "intercept" the "contents" of an "electronic communication," as per the Act's language. But what I haven't yet seen in this flurry of reaction is a specific analysis of how these terms relate to the technology of an Internet communication, which I think is necessary to do in order to be able to apply the Act to an Internet monitoring scheme such as this.
In my note this is the tack I took, first taking a look at the nature of an Internet "packet." A packet is a piece of an Internet communication. If you send an email, for instance, it will be broken down into pieces and then transmitted through the Internet separately. Each piece, or "packet," contains "layers" of information: the bit of the actual content itself and then layers of instructions that tell the hardware and software of the Internet where to send the packet and what to do with it once it arrives. In my view it's integral to look at the layered nature of Internet communications because I think the legal analysis hinges on what layer of the packet the Internet monitoring is working on.
It's particularly important when it comes to analyzing the idea of "interception." Because Internet packets pass through routers on the way to their destination, it would break the Internet if a router's capture and handling of a packet amounted to an illegal interception under the statute. But the basic operation of a router only requires looking at the address information attached to the packet; it's when a device looks at the message being sent within that packet -- its content -- that an illegal interception takes place. Which makes sense, because it's in the content of a communication where an Internet user has a privacy interest. Indeed, the whole reason for the monitoring exercise proposed by the ISPs is because they want to scrutinize and react to specific content. If users therefore want their communications to reach their destination unmeddled-with, then they'll need to ensure that they do remain private, legally obscured to parties transmitting them. Which the Wiretap Act should do.]]>
The folly of DRM, againtag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11742008-01-10T19:43:13Z2008-01-11T01:40:31ZThe Open Rights Group blog posted about a public hearing in England where the head of the BBC was grilled for why the BBC is insisting on encumbering all its video with DRM (Digital Rights Management). The myth of DRM...
Open Rights Group blog posted about a public hearing in England where the head of the BBC was grilled for why the BBC is insisting on encumbering all its video with DRM (Digital Rights Management). The myth of DRM is that it can ensure that only people who have legitimate rights of access can enjoy digital works, but in reality not only does it fail to deliver on that promise but its major feature is that it actually prevents people with legitimate rights of access from enjoying digital works. Hence the recent hearing where the BBC was queried on why it insists on hiding publicly-funded programs behind proprietary digital players that much of the public can't run on their computers.
Of course, not only is the British public directly harmed by this DRM policy, but it's also indirectly harmed when it walls off so many of these quality creative efforts from the rest of the world. I wrote about this in my recent London travelogue post but commented about it more succinctly on the Open Rights Group post:
It doesn’t do the English economy any good for its television to be locked up behind DRM. Much though I like a lot of British television (I’m an American) I refuse to “upgrade” my computer to have a compatible player in order to be able to watch the vast amount that hasn’t otherwise managed to make its way over here.
Fortunately for the English economy there’s YouTube and enterprising fans who are willing to take the time to upload so many great and otherwise unavailable shows. Last month I was all set to enjoy a holiday in France, but as it happens I’ve recently been on a Stephen Fry kick and, thanks to YouTube, got to enjoy enough great English television (QI, Kingdom, etc.) that I was inspired to go visit England instead.
In other words, because of “piracy,” the English economy reaped the financial benefit of all my transportation, food, entertainment and lodging costs, and, in the “what about the artists, how ever will they afford to eat?” department, profits and royalties when, for souvenirs, I bought several books by English authors in local stores. You know, books - those nice, DRM-free works of creativity that can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere...
It should be noted, of course, that I purchased not a single DVD for any of that coveted English entertainment. After all, why bother? It was England so all those DVDs on sale in English stores were set for Region Two, which I'd never be able to play on my American Region 1 equipment.
So let's analyze this as a business decision: DVD producers are so worried that people won't buy their DVDs that they have made it impossible for people to buy their DVDs. They must be laughing all the way to the bank as they count all the pennies I didn't spend on their product. After all, they've shown me! All that region-encoding DRM'll teach me not to pirate video and buy only legit copies instead. Er, wait a minute...
Edited: A point of clarification: The show Kingdom I referred to in my comment - a really, really excellent show, and I don't just say that because Stephen Fry plays a lawyer - is actually an ITV production, not a BBC one. So you don't have quite the same policy argument about locking up publicly-funded behind specious DRM. On the other hand, as a commercial venture the level of idiocy rises to new heights, given how ITV has decided to prevent people from viewing it over the Internet. Not only must you run Microsoft's largely and rightfully scorned Internet Explorer, and not only must you run its DRM ActiveX component, but in order to view it you also must be in England.
Silly me. Here I was, so impressed by the show, that I was about to suggest in entire seriousness that people write to Rebecca Eaton at WGBH and specifically ask that she bring it over for rebroadcast in the US, but like any writing campaign its success would be dependent on enough people knowing what they were talking about to be motivated to pick up a pen (so to speak). But I guess ITV doesn't care if America ever gets to watch the show, or any revenues such an airing might provide, since there's no way for Americans to even find out if they'd like it enough to lobby for it. Except, of course, by watching "pirate" copies through YouTube. But, really, should we even bother to go to that effort? Yes, the show was wonderful - perfectly cast, written, acted, and shot with sympathetic characters, gorgeous scenery, and well-balanced and thematically substantive scripts - but since ITV doesn't think we should ever get to see it, why fight it? Let people and their television remain on their respective shores. So what if the world is poorer for it, financially and culturally. At least we won't have *gasp* people enjoying things for free.]]>
MovableType grumblestag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11732008-01-07T20:38:16Z2008-01-21T03:03:45ZI recognize that some of my worst blog posts have been in the housecleaning category when I've gone twelve rounds with trying to upgrade my blogging software. There you've seen full-blown temper tantrums in response to the immense frustration such...
housecleaning category when I've gone twelve rounds with trying to upgrade my blogging software. There you've seen full-blown temper tantrums in response to the immense frustration such undertakings have necessarily caused. In the end I've always succeeded, but not without insignificant suffering.
The thing to realize in reading them, however, is that they don't reflect a lack of composure on my part nearly as much as they reflect a surfeit of defects on the software's part. In other words, yes, maybe it would have been better not to flail about so publicly, but such flailing was certainly not unwarranted. In fact, it may say numerous positive things about my composure that I only flailed about this much...
Nonetheless, criticism is always more weighty when given in a cool, calm, and collected manner, so I will endeavor to restrain myself before launching into the following complaint: MovableType is a complete pain in the ass to deal with.
I started using it nearly half a decade ago in large part because it was the only blogging software I'd ever heard of that could be installed on your own domain. Back then it was at version 2.something. Since then it has worked its way to version 4.01, via a major jump to version 3, lesser incremental jumps to version 3.3 or 3.4, and another major jump to version 4. I suppose the major jumps are a necessary evil; whenever you design a major software product you always want it to scale to new uses, but it's sometimes hard to anticipate them so far in the future. After a while it gets to the point where you can't continue to improve on what you've got - you have to start over from scratch.
As a MovableType user it's kind of distressing when this happens because it means you'll have to start over as well in order to upgrade. Hence my previous frustrations, as the upgrades often killed all my customizations and styling, and at times my posts themselves. Many people have chosen to avoid the frustrations by not upgrading at all - I know quite a few quality blogs that are still at version 2.x. But upgrading may be a necessary evil, as the newer versions close security holes while also promising new, exciting, and even useful capabilities the older versions were without.
It's this promise which is at the root of my discontent, because I so often find it so often undelivered. To be fair, eventually I came to like version 3. I could see how its general design offered some significant improvements over version 2, mostly by separating more effectively the content of the page from the design of the page. Of course, this separation meant that large parts of my site broke during the upgrade, but eventually things settled down and third-party developers started providing other tools and plugins to make using the MovableType product a relatively easy proposition.
Not content to rest on their laurels - which I suppose is reasonable - MovableType's developers decided to provide even more functionality. Which sounds good, but unfortunately doing so apparently required yet another complete reconceptualization of the product. This time, instead of better separating the look-and-feel elements of the blog from the content elements like they did in the last major upgrade, this time it was going to further split out the rendering logic from the page content as well.
Generally speaking, this approach seems to make sense. The power of the web in general is best realized when all its aspects (display, content, logic) are separately provided. A database holds the content, which middleware logic accesses and compiles into a page of output that a stylesheet then controls the display of. The less discrete each aspect is, the less flexible (and therefore the less powerful) each will be.
But after taking a look under the hood of the MT 4.01 version I recently installed I'm perturbed: I can't figure out what's going on. I see in general what it's trying to achieve, but exactly how it tries to go about it is a mystery. Which is extremely unfortunate now that I'm trying to work with it.
My needs themselves are modest. Initially all I'm looking to do is set up a site similar to the site I've already got. I have a second project lined up that might need to push the envelope a bit, but at first all I need is something simple: a nice website with blogging capability and a simple yet somewhat customized appearance. And I can't do it.
Well, let me rephrase: I'm sure I could do it, given enough time. But the fact that I need to employ skills I haven't honed since the peak of my previous technical career strikes me as something very wrong. If you need to have professional-caliber web development skills to be able to set up your own blog, all the promise of a world where people can truly self-publish through their own presses is lost. Yes, people can still blog, using the various services out there (e.g., Blogspot, TypePad, etc.). But there are definite advantages to owning your own autonomous outlet, and it really shouldn't be this hard to do so.
My criticism of MovableType is based in part on the sense that when revamping the product for version 4, the developers made some poor decisions when it came to designing its architecture. Various PR statements I keep seeing with respect to how wonderful the 4.1 version- still in beta - will be make me think the developers might themselves agree that it missed the mark. Of course, the touting of the upcoming beta just adds to my feeling of having been an idiot for upgrading to a product, MT 4.01, when it clearly was not ready for primetime. In fact, so unprepared was it that few there's a dearth of third-party applications that might make using it easier. All these developers seem to be waiting for the 4.1 version themselves before they waste their time on work that will likely break as soon as it comes out.
But these problems would be much less significant if, for once, there was actually good documentation. Over the years the MovableType developers have bragged about new MT versions having better and better documentation, but in my experience it's actually ended up worse and worse. And not just worse, but often objectively and unforgivably bad. For example, there's documentation on their website that apparently only applies to the 3.x version but bears no indication of such fact. The only way one would know is because all the 4.x documentation bears the notation that it's all still in draft form!!!
The other day I went to see what would be involved with trying to set up the new website I wanted to make. I'd gotten the hang of version 3.x and figured it would only take a few hours to set things up under version 4. But I was wrong. It won't take hours: it will take days, maybe even weeks if I wait for the 4.1 beta to get finally released, which will hopefully (although the way things have gone in the past, probably won't) address the things about it that are currently cumbersome and cryptic with version 4.01. The administration screens' user interface provides few clues about how it's all to work, and there's no supporting documentation to help guide me through figuring it out either. It's a terrible state of affairs, and if I'd paid money for this I'd be demanding a refund.
But that's the thing: I'm using MovableType for free. In fact, the company that develops it is further encouraging warm, fuzzy feelings with its recent announcement that MovableType will be open source. Huzzah! This is great news, as it's always good to see powerful software be offered to the public (both as users and further developers) on financially-accessible terms. In the long run this move will make MovableType a much better product and its developers much richer...
In the meantime, however, the current version is crap. And it's got me boxed into a corner. I really want to make those sites and I want make them now. But I can't. I certainly can't make them both expediently and also the way I'd like them to be, and I'm not even sure at the moment I could either achieve expediency or make the way I'd like them to be. As it is I think the best I could hope to do is to set something up with a basic stock template and style and then change it over time as further upgrades make it feasible. Unfortunately that means I'd have to commit a cardinal sin of web development by launching a website that's not actually done. While it's always fair game to improve and tweak a site, wholesale changes to a user interface should really be done before a site is launched and users become acclimated to it. Just as major software products should not be released before they are done and users (try to) become acclimated to it...
So frustrated have I been by all this that I even looked into chucking MT altogether and instead switching over to WordPress. I generally hear much less bitching and moaning about WordPress, and at first glance the administration of it does seem much less cryptic than MT ever was.
But the only viable solution I've ever seen for comment spam is a MovableType solution, and I don't think I could live without it. Plus, in the long run I wish to maintain several blogs on my website and take advantage of some of that promised functionality, so with MovableType I think I am stuck.
How that will affect anything you'll see here will eventually become apparent. In the meantime, however, I just needed to complain...]]>
Stormy weathertag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11702008-01-04T22:20:14Z2008-01-06T03:06:02ZDawn didn't bother to come today. A storm came instead and pretty much broke the Bay Area with buckets of rain and tons of wind. Up early, I saw it come in as rain and wind started lashing the houseboat....
broke the Bay Area with buckets of rain and tons of wind.
Up early, I saw it come in as rain and wind started lashing the houseboat. Inside everything was fine, for a while. The lights had gone off twice before when, around 7:30, they went out for good. Which was sad, since daylight never really came along to replace it.
Meanwhile the tide had come up and we were floating. In storms previous we've bobbed a bit, but you don't usually have any sensation of buoyancy unless you look out the window and see things moving. But today... today you needed your sea legs to walk to the kitchen.
At one point I looked out the window to see what looked like a giant vampire landing in our parking lot, which is always an alarming sight first thing in the morning. Fortunately it turned out to only be a giant green awning that had been blown away and was now attempting a landing on the overhanging powerlines. It bounced off the upper electric ones and landed on the lower telephone and cable ones where it flapped the rest of the morning, scraping all the cars parked below it with its aluminum framing.
Sensing today might turn out to be, um, a wash... I decided to make the best of it. So I decided to go out running. It seemed safe enough, seeing how the nearby bayside bike path was in open space away from power lines or other flying debris. I may have been wrong, however, seeing how as soon as I was past the parking lot I turned back in time to see part of the roof of a neighboring building peel off... But I was already past its zone of danger so I decided I might as well continue. Which I did, only to discover that the bay had overflowed its banks and was now all over the bike path. Which was fine, I thought, as I was wearing waterproof shoes and there's nothing wrong with a little wading. Until I realized that there were, in fact, nearby powerlines after all, and if any of them had fallen into any of the enormous bay-filled puddles and were reenergized I'd have a problem. At this point my premature Jewish grandmother instincts kicked in, I declared my adventure unsafe, and I went home.
To a home that looked about as bright as it was ever going to get. Realizing that I was insufficiently prepared for disaster, at least in the flashlight department, I began a quest to find one. The quest actually went pretty well: the next town up on the freeway still had power so I was able to buy a lantern at a hardware store. Batteries, however.... I ended up at a convenience store where I paid an arm and a leg for 4 D-cells. I suppose it's a good thing I did, though, as it may well ensure that there will be power this evening.
Which would be a very good thing indeed, as there's lots of things that we need power for. Heat, for instance, although since it's been more than a month since it last worked properly I've gotten used to living without it. TV and Internet, too, require power, so I'm currently sitting in a McDonalds in Mill Valley (itself leaking) writing this as I recharge my laptop and my phone.
At this point I'd say I'm set for whatever comes tonight, power or no power, except there's one other thing we need power for that there's really no getting around: plumbing. Water can come in, no problem, but to get it out again we need a pump, and that pump needs electricity.
Looks like it may be a long, annoying night...
Edit 1/5: Well, I'm fine. The power was still off this afternoon so I ran off to camp out at a friend's place in San Francisco where there was light, heat, Internet, and fully functional plumbing.
However the somewhat goofy atmosphere has been muted by sad news about a neighbor. He was a professional diver who was working in the storm to haul in a boat adrift and didn't survive the effort. It's hard to fathom that we won't be seeing Todd anymore. I hadn't seen a lot of him since the roommates he was closest to had moved out earlier this past year, but he was the first neighbor on the dock I'd ever met, and there was a time when he'd come by all the time. A Treo enthusiast he had beamed to me the Tide Tool he always used. I don't mean this to sound trivial, but I'm sure I'll think of him whenever I use it, which is actually quite often. He connected to all of us in the house differently, but that typified my connection with him.]]>
Held overtag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11692008-01-02T19:21:30Z2008-01-02T21:07:14ZDue to high demand 2007 has been extended into the first several days of January. Yes, 2008 has already arrived and been officially feted - in Seattle, as usual - but what with all the travel, etc., I haven't had...
Seattle, as usual - but what with all the travel, etc., I haven't had a chance to finish wrapping up all the things I wanted to from the last year before plunging into all the new things for the new year.
Therefore I'm hereby declaring the rest of this week to still be part of 2007. Seeing how we've waited this long for 2008 to come along surely we can wait just a bit longer for it to actually get started.
Thank you for your understanding.]]>
News from not so far awaytag:www.cathygellis.com,2008:/mt/html//1.11682008-01-02T02:18:32Z2008-01-02T02:26:02ZNews headlines today reported on the murder of a US diplomat in Sudan. I wonder what the rest of the world thinks of such a headline, if it thinks about it at all. All over the world people get killed,...
the murder of a US diplomat in Sudan. I wonder what the rest of the world thinks of such a headline, if it thinks about it at all. All over the world people get killed, Sudan is largely thought to be a dangerous place, and given America's reputation in the world it hardly raises an eyebrow that an American might have been targeted. For most people this news might seem so ordinary or abstract as to fade into the background.
But not for the people who knew John Granville, 33, or those who benefited from the important work that people like him do. US diplomacy is not always about warmongering; the federal government also employs a number of dedicated professionals committed to nation-building, and he was one of them. Nobody wins with his loss; the world is much poorer without people like him.
Thoughts to his family and friends, and also to those of his driver, Abdelrahman Abbas Rahama, 39, who was killed with him. Without the indispensable assistance of local drivers important humanitarian work all over the world would never get done. Their loss is to be mourned as well.]]>
British rhetorictag:www.cathygellis.com,2007:/mt/html//1.11672007-12-31T03:29:53Z2007-12-31T03:56:19ZI passed a sign in a London store window advertising for a position in its Knightbridge shop. The last line of it gave me pause, something along the lines of, "English speakers only need apply." It struck me as needlessly...
I was offended, on their behalf as well as my own. I would much rather live in a pluralistic world of speakers of all languages than a homogeneous one full of such condescending English-only sign-posting jerks.
Unrelatedly, although I describe it here because it was another language issue I encountered on my recent trip to England, I saw a news retrospective on stories from 2007. An aide to Tony Blair was interviewed and asked whether, knowing what we know now, Blair's confidence in invading Iraq now seems misplaced. The aide largely circumvented the question by recounting what Blair himself had said at the time, something along the times that you always needed to be prepared to commit yourself fully to doing what you think is right.
I apologize for any slight mistranscription, as I'm not able to find the original comment on the web to copy the exact language from. But I'm not misrepresenting it as the kind of statement that sounded very principled and high-minded. No matter how hard it may be, the thought goes, you always must do what you think is right.
And that idea sounds good, doesn't it? Until you start taking it to its logical conclusion. Because on its own it would justify completely moronic ideas. Just because you think it's the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do? That's just nonsense. You may truly believe that cutting your arm off is the right thing to do. But the strength of your conviction hardly redeems it as a worthwhile plan. Somewhere some sort of rationality needs to be employed before evaluating the merits of an action. Pure idealistic conviction is not enough to justify something so otherwise unfounded and foolish, and it's itself unfounded and foolish to pretend otherwise.]]>
Trip of the (nearly) three Stephenstag:www.cathygellis.com,2007:/mt/html//1.11662007-12-29T22:29:15Z2008-01-21T00:03:24ZIt's the age old conflict: one can have time, or one can have money. This month I had lots of the former and not so much of the latter. On the other hand, I did have frequent flier miles... It...
returning from China over a year ago, or in Europe at all since returning from Hamburg in 2005. Obviously this situation could not stand...
Thanks to my current interest in the career of Stephen Fry I've spent the last few weeks more immersed than usual in English television largely thanks to the Internet, where I've been able to watch every single episode of QI (a very funny English quiz show he hosts), all of his documentaries, lots of his pre-A Bit of Fry and Laurie comedy and altogether hours and hours of fantastic English television. And all for free! Oh, the horror...
But look at it this way, British Broadcasting Company: Had I not gotten to see all this television, I never would have had my curiosity so piqued about the country that produced it. In other words, were it not for all this Internet "piracy," I was all set to visit France instead.
Of course, a trip to England did make a nice bookend to the Great Change since the last time I went was just as it was beginning. Like the last trip I was induced to travel this time because of the influence of a performer. But that time it was an American one, and the trip itself largely seemed very American, like we had just all packed up our American lives and transplanted them over there. This time I thought it would be better to immerse myself as deeply into English life as possible.
I arrived around midday Christmas Eve. My seatmate on the flight over, also traveling on frequent flier miles, would a few days later be continuing onto France so I gave her a list of things to experience in Paris, a list I realize is getting increasingly outdated as more time passes between the present and my last visit in 2003. (Perhaps there's some French tv on YouTube I should watch? Perhaps something starring a 6'5 Etienne Frire?) However despite having been to London a few times before I didn't feel I knew the city well enough to give her tips about it. In fact I didn't even realize myself just how ill-advised it was to travel there over Christmas. Nothing is open. But maybe that's just as well since you couldn't get to anything anyway, what with every form of public transport completely idled. I don't understand that: on major holidays people like to visit each other - how are they to do so if they can't get around? Everyone seems to be locked within their neighborhoods, which, particularly in such an ethnically pluralistic city as London, seems to border on cruel.
But, it's England, and things there are different from the US. Which is why it was worth the trip in the first place. No point in having a change in scenery if the new scenery is no different than where you started. Anyway, I wasn't particularly inconvenienced once I got settled in and acquired groceries. My hostel had warned me when I checked in on the 24th, "If you want to eat tomorrow you'd better get food today." Even the neighborhood McDonalds across from the Kings Cross train station would be closed(!). So after I checked in I rushed back out to track down a supermarket. Fortunately I have a map of London that happens to list where every Tesco is. Unfortunately this map is from 1999, and the first Tesco I sought out today turns out to be but a hole in the ground...
Fortunately I found another one near Leicester Square. Unfortunately it was nearly completely out of food. Even grocery stores in 1992 Russia had more vegetables... But I managed to get what I needed and then spent the remaining late afternoon hours wandering the Covent Garden area as throngs of shoppers tried to make last minute purchases before the shops all closed - many as early as 4pm! How very unamerican it all seemed, to shut down even when there were so many potential customers ready, willing, and able (if not also desperate) to buy things. England is certainly not a country that favors procrastinators...
I had forgotten to send Santa the address to my hostel so Christmas itself was a low-key affair. But with nowhere to go anyway I just kicked back in the lounge. It's an interesting hostel - slightly upscale, with more grown-ups as guests than young backpackers. Rooms have only 5 to 8 beds in them with en suite bathrooms and are clean, comfortable, and reasonably safe. (Maybe not so quiet though if your roommate happens to snore...) There were lots of interesting people to talk to in the lounge - Brits, even - as we all sat around watching British television all day, including the Queen's annual Christmas speech (her fiftieth televised one), a rather nihilistic Doctor Who Christmas episode, two even more nihilistic EastEnders Christmas episodes, and a 25th anniversary reunion special of To the Manor Born, which I'm sure WGBH will soon be bringing over to disappoint American viewers everywhere (there were some really funny moments in this episode, but sadly not enough of them). Meanwhile I ate all the food I'd brought in the day before. Good, decent, English food. Like a Tesco Shephard's Pie... And a Christmas pudding I got from Harrod's. In fact, I've been eating a lot of English food as part of the whole travel experience. In Covent Garden the day before I'd come upon a pastie stall. I'd never had a pastie before and was thinking about daring to try one when a little girl came away clutching her steaming pastie-filled sachet, sighing in her English accent, "There's nothing in the world like a warm pastie..." Turns out she might be right.
The other odd thing about English television on Christmas was the commercials. I saw no less than five, maybe even six, consecutive sofa commercials during a single commercial break. Boxing Day is apparently a big sale day in England, but where it differs from the US is that apparently everyone uses it to buy big ticket items. I guess that's a good use of a sale day, but I didn't even know there could possibly be so many couch commercials out there in the world...
My own Boxing Day plans involved first meeting up with an English friend at Victoria Station. Unfortunately our rendezvous nearly turned into an unrequited disaster as we experienced a complete collapse of all information technology. E.g., not only did I not have a cell phone that worked in England, I didn't even have his phone number... I did have a laptop from which I sent him email, but then Hotmail decided not to bother to deliver any of it. Compounding these problems I also had no idea what train he was coming in on, and, since we've only met once before, little idea what he looked like... Of course, I have successfully met men at train stations in London under even sketchier circumstances before (wait, that came out wrong...), and like then this time it all ended up working out too.
This friend, one of the Stephens of this trip, had done me an enormous favor, vis a vis one of the other Stephens. Through some fortuitous googling after I'd already planned the trip I discovered that Stephen Fry had written a pantomime that was currently being performed at the Old Vic. Given my current interest in his work I thought it would be nice to see it. Besides, I'd never seen an English pantomime before, which, as I discovered through some additional googling, is itself an English Christmas tradition. So, as they say, when in Rome... er, London... It was too close to the performance date to buy my own ticket online, so my friend was kind enough to buy it for me. Of course, there was an awkward moment in our email exchange when he wrote, "Let me know if you still fancy it and I can have a word with a mate in London to pop along to the box office." Sure I knew what he meant but I had no idea how to phrase a response answer that wouldn't sound like I was mocking him...
The show wasn't until the evening, so I walked around for a while beforehand. I was curious to see what Belgravia was like since it was a setting used by Hugh Laurie in his novel. But it turns out I already knew...
My first trip to London had been with my mom and sister when I was 17. In a bit of wise parenting my mom had allowed me two days to myself so she wouldn't have a sullen teenager on her hands for the days we were together. One day I went to Oxford, and the other I spent wandering around London. I remember at one point walking around the neighborhood near our hotel searching for something for dinner and completely failing to find anything suitably casual or affordable. It was really an incredibly boring neighborhood. Which I realized the other day, as I stumbled out of Belgravia only to find myself directly in front of the Intercontinental, was this very same incredibly boring neighborhood.
Not everything on that trip had been so dull, thankfully, and I did spend a lot of time in the Piccadilly Circus area exploring all the book and record stores for items relating to Huey Lewis and the News. But times change, tastes change... and this time I found myself in one of the same large bookstores I'd been in before but in a section I'd never ever thought to approach: the law section.
It was so strange: I found myself positively giddy standing before all those law books, like a kid in a candystore. If this isn't evidence of the Great Change, I don't know what is. As I looked at all these books on English law I realized I desperately wanted to know everything inside them. Moreover, as I flipped through them I realized I could know everything inside them. The specifics were often different from American law (although not always - Rylands v. Fletcher, anyone?) but case law is case law and I do know how to read case law.
I resisted the enormous temptation to buy any or all of these books and instead headed over to the Paul boulangerie I'd earlier seen in Leicester Square. Paul is a French chain of artisan boulangers. When I'd given recommendations to the fellow traveler heading to France I had included the suggestion to have a baguette sandwich there. It's not my favorite boulangerie in Paris (for that you need to find the tiny anonymous place in Courbevoie across the street from the studio apartment I lived in for two months), but it is definitely better than most. So, to scratch my "Were it not for YouTube I'd be in France" itch, I went there for a sandwich jambon et beurre. Sadly, however, I chickened out on using French with the francophonic clerks and instead just spoke embarrassingly incompetent English. Which was too bad, since their English was perfectly fine.
Soon it was time for the pantomime. I think I may write about it separately at some point, but my most important thought is that I was immensely glad I went. All details of the production aside, which were generally quite good, as a foreign tourist it was fascinating to see something so of the place I was visiting. Watching the audience watch the play was just as entertaining to me as my watching the play itself.
I began my last full day in London by seeing the movie St. Trinian's. It too was very English. I can't imagine it will ever make it over to America, although Colin Firth fans might want to try track it down somehow. (Much of the movie seems to involve humiliating his character - and potentially also him. At one point he kills a character named Mr. Darcy. One wonders, given Colin Firth's strange self-referential career trajectory, if he might have wished to do so himself...) Most of it involves satirizing very English things (public schools, quiz shows, English celebrities, etc.) that would only really make sense or be funny to people who knew enough about them to have some sort of cultural reference. Thankfully because I watched all those QI episodes I at least understood Stephen Fry's quizmaster cameo and its implicit self-mockery... but most other Americans probably wouldn't have. Interestingly the movie seems to have largely been panned by local press, most of whom seem to feel the original did not require a remake. But for my part, while I've never seen the original, I thought this particular version stood reasonably well on its own. Perhaps not BAFTA-worthy, but sufficiently entertaining nonetheless.
It was very strange though, seeing the movie. I saw it at 11:30am for a mere 5.50 early bird rate -- at Piccadilly Circus no less. But just a few hundred yards down the road at Leicester Square the matinee price would have been over 12 pounds! It was good that I'd saved my pennies though, because I was about to spend them when it was back to the bookstore for me...
Because who needs a souvenir t-shirt when instead you can bring home English law books? I got three small subject summaries on tort law, contract law, and English constitutional law, and a big textbook-like thing on intellectual property because, yes, I really am that much of a geek. (Interestingly there were no books on "Property," like in the US. Instead there were books on "Land." I didn't get one, but I wonder if that was the right call. There's a lot of unintuitive nuance to English land law I'd be curious about, but judging by the bits of it that have made it into American property law it probably would have been so esoterically cryptic as to reduce me to tears...)
Then I also got some paperbacks. This is really unprecedented for me. I rarely buy books. Hell, I rarely even read books... But lately I've been rediscovering just how pleasurable it is to enjoy good ones. So I got Hugh Laurie's because I really liked it and now won't have to run to the library whenever I want to enjoy the language again, Stephen Fry's memoir and poetry books for the same reason, Michael Palin's Python diaries, and a Terry Pratchett novel. That last one was sort of spontaneous; I'd never read anything of his before. But England seems to have this annoying predilection for 3-for-2 sales. "Buy three of something you'd never want three of, and the third one is free..." In this case though two of my desired books were part of the 3-for-2 promotion so I essentially bought them and then got another book for free. Of the possibilities to chose from it was a toss-up between the Terry Pratchett novel or one by Ben Elton (a Fry and Laurie peer) but I opted for the former partly because I'm annoyed with Ben Elton over his Maybe Baby movie, a movie that I really wanted to like but couldn't, and partly because coincidentally I've randomly been running across Terry Pratchett's name quite a lot lately, sometimes for silly reasons, and sometimes for more somber ones.
My next stop was Kensington, which is where I was when I heard about the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Particularly after reading Ann Althouse's justifiable excoriation of American tv news that seemed to completely miss the significance of it, I was glad I was somewhere where I able to see the BBC's much more globally-aware coverage.
There was one more very English thing left to do on my trip, which was to meet up with my friend again in a pub to watch some English football. Manchester City (his team) v. Blackburn (I think?), who managed to force a tie thanks to an extremely offsides player who got away with it. Oh, but first we went to a different pub for what turned out to be some of the worst fish and chips I've ever had. O'Neill's is a chain of Irish pubs which advertises that it's about traditional pub food with that little extra Irish touch, where "touch" apparently means "Guinness." However they were supposed to add the beer to the batter, not to the cook, who must have had several before producing what appeared on our plates...
And that was pretty much the end of the English part of my trip. The next day it was time to fly back to the US, detouring to NJ in order to see some of my family before heading back home to California. Unfortunately it turned out that I didn't get to see the third intended Stephen of the trip after all: my dad. Oh well, I guess I will on the next trip, as I'm sure there'll be lots more Stephens in the future to lure me away again.]]>
Paean to a polymathtag:www.cathygellis.com,2007:/mt/html//1.11652007-12-28T22:43:34Z2008-02-05T21:40:59ZThere's nothing like trying to rave about a writer to make one self-conscious about their own writing. For quite some time now I've been trying to find just the right words to wax on about a particular wordsmith. Unfortunately these...
There's nothing like trying to rave about a writer to make one self-conscious about their own writing. For quite some time now I've been trying to find just the right words to wax on about a particular wordsmith. Unfortunately these are the best I can come up with, although there are quite a few of them...:
Never mind Hugh Laurie, I think I'm in love with his colleague Stephen Fry.
Yes, that is a very silly thing to say. After all he's too tall, too English, and too predisposed not to be interested in someone with my particular chromosomal structure for us ever to have a future together... No, I just mean that he seems like someone who would be absolutely fascinating to meet for a conversation sometime.
Which, given that I think I may only be two degrees away from him via several avenues, may not be beyond the realm of possibility of ever happening. But more on that later - first, the gushing...
I could begin by gushing about his acting. He fits the criteria of actors I admire - people for whom acting isn't a substitution for their own intelligence but rather a vehicle for expressing it. I have not yet caught up with the full catalog of his dramatic productions but what I have seen so far I've enjoyed. See, for example, his portrayal of P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable butler Jeeves. Jeeves was Wodehouse's notion, but his televised embodiment was Stephen Fry's creation. His Jeeves is a pillar of quiet strength, servile but hardly subordinate, and, if I were the type to ever use such a word, also completely adorable. Such a figure of reassuring steadiness is his Jeeves that I always feel better whenever I see him on the screen, personally comforted by the knowledge that with him on the job all will soon be set right.
I could also continue to gush about Stephen's own original comedic work. I've watched every bit of Fry and Laurie I could find, including the sketches they did before their own series. My face still aches from all the smiling. What's notable, though, is not that he's funny, per se - because what does that mean, anyway? - but that he has a sense of humor. These aren't the same things. Tragic figures can be funny - people are always able to laugh at other's misfortune. But it takes a sense of humor - an ability to actually sense the humor - to create something that's meaningfully funny. I always get the feeling that he's someone who enjoys a laugh as much as he likes to inspire them, and as a result it's easy to trust his humorist sensibilities.
It's his sensitivity generally that shines through in his other work as well. He's lately been doing a series of documentaries - on HIV, on manic depression, on genealogy - and in this non-fictional work he comes across as genuinely caring as he gently leads viewers through the important stories he's telling.
I'm sure I could continue to list things to gush about - I haven't even begun to talk about his writing - but I'm going to want to change gears and talk more about the areas of personal resonance my recent exploration of his work has had. I have certainly enjoyed everything described above. On their basis alone I could call myself a Stephen Fry fan and be interested in seeing anything else he does along those lines. I probably have been ever since first seeing him on screen years ago. But in the last month or so, as I've enjoyed diving into his incredibly deep body of work more particularly, certain qualities to it, and by proxy him, have inspired a much more significant appreciation than mere admiration for the product would necessarily explain.
I wrote a post some weeks ago talking about a trip to the library and rediscovering what fun it was to check out books for pleasure reading. What I didn't say was that I was checking out his books. To be fair, this wasn't my first trip to the local library. I'd already checked out Hugh Laurie's book a few weeks earlier and about a year before a different book altogether. But I remember as I walked among the shelves of the Mill Valley library with a long list of Stephen Fry's titles to find feeling this long-forgotten feeling of excited (and, oddly, illicitly-tinged) anticipation: I was going to get to read a book!
I ended up with three of his many books, which for lack of a better plan I read in the order they were published. The first was a novel, The Hippopotamus. I did have a slightly hard time getting into it as he does sometimes tend to dawdle in exposition, and I was trying to read it while commuting on a bus, which is a difficult (and jolting) environment for enjoying his always-apt yet loquacious digressions. Not that "bus commuting-worthiness" should be a metric by which to judge literature, but I figure anyone who might be inclined to read it too should be advised in advance on what might or might not be an appropriate environment in which to do so... It had at first appeared to take a while for the plot to unfold, but on retrospect I can see that it had been unfolding all the time as he wove together all his characters into a unified and satisfying story.
The third book - more on the second one later - was another novel, Revenge. (I think it may also have been published under the title The Stars' Tennis Balls.) This novel improved upon The Hippopotamus in a key way - shorter chapters! Lots of good places to put the book down when real life beckoned... Still, I can't quite recommend it as good bus reading either... In the latter case it was partly because, again, there was a lot of exposition, covering maybe as much as the first third of the book. And the role of the protagonist kept shifting from one character to another - although I don't mention this as a criticism. I actually thought it was an interesting approach, but it did mean that it was slightly hard to penetrate the book since it took a while to figure out what was really going on. But then once it settled on a clear direction it became an engrossing read.
It's only quite recently that I finished it, and I'm still left considering how I feel about it. At first I thought it was his answer to Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller novel, but then I realized that Stephen Fry's was much scarier. He did a really excellent job, writing this book around the turn of the millennium, in creating setting, summing up the modern progress of the 20th century and intimating toward the apocalyptic post-modern horror that would soon be the 21st, but I sometimes found it too hard to contemplate the reality he was explaining. Sure, this was fiction, but like Hugh Laurie's book its satirical humor has diminished where reality has caught up with it. I realize I'm being frustratingly vague because I'm trying not to give away any spoilers, but let's just say that the technological civil libertarian in me frequently wanted to cry, not because the book was wrong in what it described but because I fear it was right. Way too much of this fiction was way too plausible to be able to sleep comfortably at night.
And then there was the second book, the memoir. A quick search on my blog reveals that, before now, I've used the word "memoir" only twice before in 1100+ posts - once alluding to the legalities surrounding James Frey's apparently fictional one, and once just a few weeks ago in my series of posts about "The Great Change considered." Which, as it happens, were written immediately after finishing Stephen's book.
His Moab is My Washpot memoir has been widely hailed because of two topics he candidly confronted: his homosexuality and bipolar disorder. I'm neither homosexual nor bipolar, but I still felt his book speak to me because of how it was written. Stephen's voice sounds an awful lot like my own, and for that alone I read it with immensely relieved gratitude.
I'll try to explain, because I don't mean to be so arrogant as to try to pass myself off as his literary equal. There are two major points of connection: his use of words themselves, and his transparency. With regards to the latter, his memoir was a profoundly personal document that he shared publicly anyway. I obviously don't know exactly what he was thinking when he decided to do so, but from reading other interviews and such I gather that doing so probably made perfect sense to him. And I understand that. Maybe there are some brains out there whose mental calculations always equate "personal" with "private," but mine has never really been wired that way. It's not that I lack a sense of discretion, or any sort of sense period. There's obviously consequences to letting people see your wrinkles, including that people now know you are wrinkled. But there's consequences to not sharing too, and, on the heels of reading Stephen's book, I explored them in my first "Great Change considered" post:
[It regularly raises] the hackles of those more risk-averse that I should be so candid in my posts, but surely they wouldn't want the alternative, a world where no one shared anything that's personal. This is what writers are for, to share bits of themselves so that others may discover they are not alone. Without people brave enough to share their lives publicly - think novels, memoirs, or newspaper columns, if the idea of blogs frightens you - everyone else would be islands adrift, never knowing how common their own experiences were since they would have nothing to connect them to. Writing exists to unite readers. I'm not saying that I deserve a parade for being willing to put myself out there, but my point is that excoriation is hardly an appropriate response either.
I suspect he might ratify this sentiment. There are so many who have found his candor so commendable, including me. My issues are not the same as his issues, but I can't overstate how reassuring it was to read his recounting of his path back from a difficult place just as I was trying to find my way back from mine.
The other point of connection to note is his use of words themselves. It's really not a question of him writing in a way I liked or found amusing. I liked Hugh Laurie's writing, for instance, but I can't generally replicate it. Well, occasionally and with practice I can sometimes come close, but the natural tides of my personality tend to pull me towards much more verbose articulation than Hugh's succinct pithiness. Whereas the tides of Stephen's personality seem much more like my own. While his love affair with words is longer and deeper than mine, he pushes and pulls and dances across their syllabic delicacy in ways I often tend to. True, he's been criticized for it. Like me he's been criticized for it. Even by me he's been criticized for it, above, for potentially meandering too long on digressions in his novels. But I think we would tend to share the thought that with so much in the world to express it's hard to bring oneself to skimp on vocabulary. There's so many things to say, and so many great words with which to do it.
Reading through those Great Change posts, written so soon after finishing his book, you could probably hear some of Stephen Fry's voice echoed in them. But it's only a slight affectation. Emerging through my Great Change my muse had gotten confused and muddled and sometimes no writing occurred because I'd lost connection with any sort of instinctive vocabulary to do it with. Discovering his writing was tremendously helpful because I could key what I wanted to say to his tone, almost imaging him narrating what I had to say. And in doing so find my way back to my own voice.
Of course, I'm hardly his twin. A published author, playwright, actor, comedian, raconteur, television presenter, amateur academic, etc. he's already distinguished himself in numerous fields. Far more than I can claim, although I'm working on it... He's a perfect example of a modern Renaissance Man, the kind of self-actualizing person I've always admired. There's so much in the world that's interesting - how can anyone pick just one thing to indulge in? I'm often amazed that more people are not so diversified, but maybe it takes a certain kind of personality to find so much so fascinating that they just can't keep themselves from exploring it.
The word I've seen used to describe him, as someone like this, is "polymath". I think it can generally be used as a synonym for "Renaissance Man," which pleases me since it means I can aspire to be a polymath without running into the gender-bending issues I would with the alternative... (However I think the strict definition of the term may technically be slightly different.) I've also seen him regarded as pedantic, although I think the pejorative is a little unfair. He's someone who clearly takes pride in knowing things and isn't selfish with that knowledge. What could possibly be wrong with that? I've noted before about how strange it is that people keep approaching me for the time and/or directions. But the truth is that I find it immensely flattering (if not also a little terrifying as I've become quite unsure lately that I will not get people hopelessly lost...) to be regarded as someone who knows stuff. I like knowing stuff. I wish I knew more stuff. And I love sharing what I know. Yes, perhaps I'm a pedant too - it's certainly seems a worthy goal.
There's also the word, "opsimath," which I first saw in the book he wrote on poetry, The Ode Less Traveled. (Yes, the actor/comedian/playwright/etc. has also done that too...) An opsimath is someone who continues to learn throughout life. It seems like a good thing to be. He certainly seems to answer to that description, enthusiastically diving into whatever subject captures his imagination. And maybe with my new career, new languages, new skills, new talents... maybe so do I.
The effect of him being an opsimathic polymath is that he has been extremely prolific. For weeks now I've been working my way through what he's produced and I still feel like I've only barely scratched the surface. His work ranges from the silly to the serious, which itself I find heartening, particularly as I am increasingly spreading my creative wings while simultaneously entering a very serious profession. It's good to see that one doesn't have to preclude the other. But what currently excites me, and is another area of connection between us, is that he blogs! A kindred spirit, I always knew... It's such a convenient proclivity for him to have, too, as it requires no trips to the library or book store to get to enjoy a potentially bottomless supply of fresh writing...
Which leads me to one final point of connection and full circle to why I said above our paths might one day legitimately cross: he's a geek! Or, as they apparently say in England, a "dork." An unabashed, experienced, and extremely knowledgeable technophile he even now regularly writes a column for the Guardian about the subject. It's because of this interest that we are only two degrees away in various dimensions and why, if I continue to hew the professional path to which I've aspired, he might someday find himself blogging about wanting to meet me...
Edited slightly 2/5/08.]]>
It's all fun and games until someone loses a "y"tag:www.cathygellis.com,2007:/mt/html//1.11642007-12-25T18:41:04Z2007-12-30T20:47:13ZIn reading a few months ago about the poor woman from MIT who was detained for raising the irrational hackles of Logan Airport authorities for the t-shirt she was wearing I was reminded by my own experience last year bearing...
the poor woman from MIT who was detained for raising the irrational hackles of Logan Airport authorities for the t-shirt she was wearing I was reminded by my own experience last year bearing what turned out to be my own bit of performance art at the very same airport.
I posted this story last year on the Huey Lewis and the News board but I want to post it in full here too, partly because it's silly and partly because I think it's an allegory about faulty risk assessment:
At the Good Morning America concert at Bryant Park Friday some random guys barged into the front of the crowd and gave out painted styrofoam letters that spelled out "We [heart] Huey." I'm not quite sure how it worked out this way, but by the time the women interested in holding the letters figured out how to spell "Huey" so it wouldn't sound like someone retching, I suddenly found myself holding a blue "Y." Although I could hardly believe my good fortune that I was about to realize my lifelong dream of singing and dancing on national television while holding a "Y," I took my "Y"-waving duties very seriously. "I must not wave the 'Y' negligently," I thought to myself, in so many words. Had you heard me say this out loud you would have been completely justified in slapping me at that point. I was certainly tempted to, just for thinking it.
Anyway, having been laden with this awesome "Y"-waving burden, I decided to make the most of it, and after the show I opted to keep the "Y." This necessitated walking through Manhattan while carrying a spare "Y," but seeing how it was Manhattan no one noticed.
I decreed it to be the official Huey Lewis and the News concert-going "Y," and so brought it with me to the Jones Beach concert that evening. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me bring it in. Instead they enforced their unwritten "no 'Y'" policy against me. Apparently they feared that either I or a neighboring fan would just go wild with it and poke someone in the eye. Seems that there is such a thing as negligent "Y" waving after all, and they were determined not to have it take place in their venue. I do think, however, that had Huey spelled his name with an "O" that would have been acceptable. Damn Huey for his obstinately phonetic appellation. It ruined all my fun.
Undaunted, however, I brought it with me to the Holmdel, New Jersey concert the next night, where they had no problems with me bringing in my "Y." Apparently in NJ you're free to poke as many people in the eye as you please.
The question now is, should I bring my "Y" to the next show in Turlock, California? Does anyone know if they have a "no 'Y'" policy? Is it likely that they will make one between now and then? This is, of course, presuming that I can remember to pack it. You know how I am with that, and I think it would be really stupid – as well as embarrassing – to pack a "Y" and not, say, pants.
These shows and this travel all took place right after the New York and New Jersey bar exams. I drove back up to Boston and from there flew out to San Francisco, where I stopped off on my way to China to see the concert in Turlock. With my "Y."
Since it didn't fit in my suitcase I had to carry it separately. Outside of Manhattan, where no one would look at you twice even if you had two heads, people do generally notice large blue "Ys" being carried around. Everyone asks, "Why?" (as if they are all being unprecedentedly clever) but it turns out it's kind of fun to be a little eccentric and see how people react. I began to regard it a bit as a piece of performance art, which is generally about engaging in a similar study of human reactions.
Of course, at an airport, this is not the place to stand out. But I didn't do so purposefully, I just needed to get the "Y" from one side of the country to another and this was the only way to do it. I wasn't even thinking about it when I placed it in the X-ray machine. At that point it was just a piece of blue styrofoam to me. Yet perhaps that was unwise; after all it was a piece of blue styrofoam that security officials had already deemed dangerous. So what would the TSA people do with it?
They made the requisite jokes, and then let it through.]]>